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You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)
At the hour of his death, Jean is not afraid.
Before Riko calls for him, he disassembles himself into parts that might withstand what the whole cannot. The mind he lets escape, float away as far as it can before the blade of a knife stitches it back into his skin. The body has no out, as it never has. It will have to remain, unwilling witness to its own cleaving. The soul does not exist, perhaps, but he hedges his bets just in case. He packs it up into five words and gifts it to the one person he thinks might deem it valuable. (It was only ever one person, even if it used to be a different one.)
It is a dangerous thing, to worship a mortal, to give yourself over to a fallible human being and trust their hands won’t give beneath the weight of you. Jean unlearned how to pray when his last ever pleading words to a God that was supposed to love him (Please make it stop) went unheard. The last tattered vestiges of his trust in something beyond himself were shed when Kevin walked away.
He thinks he could not love a perfect being again. The tender space between his ribs where faith used to live was then filled by violence, and there is no going back from that. He thinks, if he relearned his love of God, it would have to be the Old Testament God, vengeful and furious and lusting for his blood, teeth sharp enough to draw it Himself. Somewhere along the way, he forgot love without violence exists.
This, he understands, is the only reason he can love Renee: violence simmers just beneath her surface. She is not an angel unable to lash out at him, but a woman who will not. He could not get down on his knees and pray with any sincere devotion if her hands were piously tied into nonviolence. She could strike him, could fill his mouth with the sacramental wine of his blood which he communes with on the daily and, instead, each time she reaches out it’s to cradle his bruised jaw and smooth out his hurt with a reverent thumb.
Jean lives in the darkest pit of Hell and his eyes have grown unaccustomed to bright things. It is good, then, that Renee’s light is soft and undemanding. It does not force itself onto his weak retinas, it guides and warms without resenting the limited capacity to adjust of the night dweller she has chosen to give her blessing to. The sun will no more be your light by day, nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you, for the Lord will be your everlasting light.
She is so much better than him that attempting to use any known unit of measurement for it would be futile. Her life was a tomb, too, once, but she escaped it, moved aside the stone covering the opening and stepped out into the sunshine with grace and gratitude. She is proof of resurrection, of miracles. He is a lost cause. There will be no rising for him, only this slow, unmerciful death of body and spirit. He does not deserve even her attention, let alone her affection, but he wants it, craves it with the starving bones and growling throat of one unused to being a human instead of a possession.
Jean, she says, and it sounds so American, so lacking in its attempt to contain the terrible misery and flesh of him, so utterly and incredibly lovely for coming from her lips. Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.
Jean is not graceful or grateful. He is made of many edges, all of them carved by blades named helplessness, he is bitter and angry and will go down spitting in the eye of everyone who has forsaken him. There was once a child who was capable of saying Thank you without being ordered to by a hand in his hair and one around his throat, but that child could not breathe underground so Jean smothered him with a pillow and did not cry. And yet, looking down the barrel of Riko’s raging grief, he could think of no more honest goodbye to her than to give her everything he had left: a warning, and a thank you.
Jean, can you hear me? Renee never did accept his fatalism. Figures she would come drag him back from the dead. He has never met anyone more stubborn, more resilient in the face of his beak and talons. I hear you, he thinks. He wants to say it, but his voice is as unreachable as painlessness. Keep talking, he wants to beg. And I will die in peace. I just need your voice to wash over me. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
He has reached the end of any human’s capacity for pain and yet, on the other side, finds fiery agony that drags him back into his weary corpse. Perhaps this is true Hell, escalating pain with no end, eyes that won’t open and hands that won’t respond, another Nest he’ll never leave. But then Renee’s incorporeal voice says, It’s okay. It’s going to be okay, and he thinks this is Heaven after all, one crafted fittingly by his vengeful Old Testament God: divine flames licking the flesh from his bones and the voice of the sweetest would-be angel guiding him through his unmaking.
How ungrateful of him, how typical of him to greet his savior with the resistance of a burden. He wants to confess and be forgiven, to be told he is good and can rest at last. “Sorry,” he mumbles, and he is not sure anymore whether Renee or Riko stands over him, whether he is begging for forgiveness or to satisfy his master’s hunger for seeing him fruitlessly beg. “Sorry, I’m—”
No strike comes as a reward, no foot to the face or fist to the chest or laugh to drive the punch deeper. There are just arms and a chest, and warring instincts to push away and burrow deeper wrestle inside him; Jean has not been held since he was small enough not to remember it. He lies still, instead, because his body is his enough for him to feel its every ache but not enough for him to be its sovereign.
His ascent is slow and it rips consciousness from him like a shroud placed over his face. It has begun, then, his burial. Let my body not be disturbed until my final breath. He can’t afford it, but he goes anyway when oblivion calls, choosing to believe it truly is Renee with him. She won’t let him be ripped to pieces in the vulnerability of sleep, or of death.
When he surfaces again, crawling from the depths of the sparse spaces between cuts and bruises, her hand alights softly on his neck. He wants to apologize again for being cumbersome and damaged. He wants to thank her again for being the one number on his phone he could text his last words to, the one person in the world who would care to hear them; for her gentle voice guiding him through the dark; for this cool touch on his skin not followed by the sick crunch of another inch of him breaking. What’s the verdict? he would ask her if he remembered how to joke. Am I alive?
A hum is all he manages, but he hopes it will suffice. Renee is omniscient enough to read his soul through his body, after all, to know him despite his insistence that he is unknown and unknowable. Sleep, Jean, she commands, and Jean would do anything for her as long as she asks him in that voice that makes everything else go quiet. Sleep, and I’ll get us home.
Home, he says, or thinks he says. He will follow her into the darkness with blind faith. Into your hands, he thinks, as he sinks slowly back down into the soft, compassionate nothingness, I commit my spirit.